On a walk, on a mission: Waterbury native to celebrate birthday with St. James Way pilgrimage

BY TRACEY O'SHAUGHNESSY | REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN

Contributed photos Former Naugatuck resident Mickey Mantle Fortin, now living in South Carolina, is fundraising to walk the Way of St. James to benefit Holy Land and the Greater Waterbury Campership Fund. At left, named after the New York Yankee great, Fortin grew up playing baseball in Naugatuck and was a star on Naugatuck High’s team. He was selected to the All-New England Baseball Team All Stars and, in 2010, to the Naugatuck Hall of Fame.Former Naugatuck resident Mickey Mantle Fortin, now living in South Carolina, is fundraising to walk the Way of St. James to benefit Holy Land and the Greater Waterbury Campership Fund. ContributedMickey Mantle Fortin, Named after the New York Yankee great, Fortin grew up playing baseball in Naugatuck and eventually was a star on Naugatuck High’s state championship team. He was selected to the All-New England Baseball Team All Stars and, in 2010, to the Naugatuck Hall of Fame. Contributed

Walking, Mickey Mantle Fortin will tell you, saved his life. It helped knit back together a pelvis, fractured in two after a devastating 2005 motorcycle accident. And it helped suture emotional wounds that had been battering him, one way or another, since he was named after baseball’s greatest hitter.

Now the Waterbury native says he’s determined to use his walking to help others. At the end of May, Mickey Mantle Fortin – the name given to him by his baseball fanatic father – will begin the St. James Way pilgrimage, also known as the also known as the Camino de Santiago, to celebrate his 65th birthday. If all goes well, as he expects, he will finish the 400-mile trek in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, on June 10, his birthday.

The former Naugatuck restaurateur estimates he will spend $5,000 on the trek. But he hopes to get there, step by step, and use whatever he raises to benefit his hometown of Waterbury.

“I’m just doing it because I can,” said Fortin, now of Graycourt, S.C. “I’m just trying to do something to help Waterbury.”

Fortin has started a GoFundMe page to raise money for the restoration of Holy Land and for the Greater Waterbury Campership Fund. The pilgrimage, on a route that is more than 1,000 years old, is expected to take 35 days. As he writes on his GoFundMe page, “I am going to walk 400 miles on a 1,100-year-old pilgrimage from the Pyrenees Mountains in France, starting at St. Jean Pied Du Port, and finishing at the St. James Monastery on the west coast of Spain … I hope to offset the $5,000-$6,000 expense of travel to Europe and raise enough to contribute money to Waterbury’s Holy Land project and perhaps help the Waterbury children by donating to the Greater Waterbury Campership fund.”

Fortin said he feels driven to complete the pilgrimage. “I’m a sinner, like everyone else,” Fortin said, fighting back tears. “I know I have caused a lot of harm and damage to people who I loved, like my children, members of my family. This pilgrimage is a religious thing. It’s in my heart.”

Fortin said an acrimonious divorce led him to “the darkest corner of my life.”

“I’m doing this as pledge to God and to my family,” he said. He and his two children do not speak, he said.

THE WAY OF ST. JAMES is a large network of ancient pilgrim routes that begins in south-central France, and ends at the tomb of St. James (Santiago in Spanish) at Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain. Although the entire pilgrimage is about 1,000 miles and takes about two-and-a-half months, the most popular route is the Camino Frances, which runs from St. Jean-Pied-du-Port near Biarritz in France to Santiago. It is particularly popular at midsummer. It was the subject of a comedy-adventure movie in 2010 called “The Way,” which starred Martin Sheen and his son, Emilio Estevez.

The history of the pilgrimage dates to the beginning of the ninth century when the tomb of St. James the Apostle was believed to have been discovered in Galicia, when Spain was dominated by Muslims (or Moors). It soon became a place of Christian pilgrimage as popular as Jerusalem and Rome.

Like many such routes, it spawned a series of ecclesiastical buildings to house and attend to the needs of pilgrims. These included hospitals, hostels, monasteries, canals and bridges

ELECTED TO THE NAUGATUCK HALL OF FAME in 2010, Fortin was born in Waterbury, where he lived until he was 13 and moved to Naugatuck. The son of Naugatuck restaurateur Clarence Fortin, he graduated from Naugatuck High School in 1971, the last year of the draft. He spent a year at Norwich University in Vermont, playing second base for the varsity baseball team there, before transferring to Florida Southern College.

In 1974, he returned to Naugatuck before he completed his degree, to help run his father’s 300-seat Fortin’s Restaurant. At 26, he started working for the Connecticut Distributors of the Seagram Company of Canada, before he returned to the restaurant business at 32, opening C.J. Eatery. That was followed by Mickey Fortin’s Italian Restaurant and Fat Frank’s Restaurant, all in Waterbury. The latter restaurant closed in 1989.

Fortin moved to Florida the next year, and entered the insurance business. He has been an insurance agent/broker since 1990. In 2005, he was in a catastrophic motorcycle accident, in which he was hit by an oncoming car. Fortin’s pelvis was split in half. He suffered a concussion and nearly split his eye open. Fortunately, Fortin said, an emergency room nurse was in the car behind him. “My doctors said, nine out of ten times, you would have been an obituary,” he said.

It was not the first time Fortin has fought himself back to redemption. “I’m so inspired by this,” Fortin said. This is his first trip to Europe. “It has chosen me just as it has chosen others in past centuries. Over the past five years I’ve wondered why? Why have I felt so driven to walk so much?

Fortin came by his first name honestly. He told the Republican-American his parents were watching the 1952 World Series, as the Yankees faced the Dodgers. Clarence promised his pregnant wife that if the rookie Mantle hit a home run, he would name their son after him.

Mantle hit the home run, and eight months later, Fortin was baptized Mickey Mantle Fortin. “When you’re named Mickey Mantle, you don’t have a choice,” Fortin said. He grew up wanting desperately to be a baseball hero. But in his sophomore year at Naugatuck High School, baseball coach Ray Legenza told Fortin’s father, “I know a ballplayer when I see one. Your kid is never going to make it as a baseball player.”

THE WORDS DEVASTATED FORTIN. “I loved my father. I wasn’t going to disappoint him. Make him a laughing stock? In his community where he had a restaurant?”

But Legenza’s dismissal also motivated him. “I hear those words to this day,” Fortin said. “It was like dousing me with Zippo lighter fluid and striking a match and putting it on me. The only thing I could think about was making something out of myself because of those words.”

“My mother used to tell me I could sell sand to sultans and snow to Eskimos,” Fortin said. “That comes from being in the restaurant business.”

By his senior year, when Naugatuck High School won the state baseball championship, he was the team’s batting champion, with an average of .377. Fortin was selected to the All-New England Baseball Team All Stars as a center fielder. “I was the kid that never was going to make it as a ballplayer,” said Fortin sarcastically. “I think that my father had some grandiose idea about naming your kid Mickey Mantle.”

In the two-year recovery period since his accident, he began walking in earnest. He typically walks at least 5 miles daily. “Walking saves me,” he said. “It releases endorphins. It makes my mind concentrate on the road. It makes me think about my life.” Since 2012, he estimates that he has walked 8,000 miles.

He is particularly eager to donate to the fund to restore Holy Land, he said. “As a youngster driving home with my parents, seeing that cross perched on the hill meant HOME in 3 minutes,” he said. “It was a signal all was safe as we ventured out from our home. Even now, seeing it still brings a warm chill down my back.”